Angel lady: Dartmouth medium tells own story

Medium and author Karen Forrest of Dartmouth has written an autobiography detailing her transition from a person with a military background to a spiritual counsellor. (TED PRITCHARD / Staff)

After passing along thousands of messages from dead people to their loved ones, Karen Forrest is accustomed to telling other people’s stories.

Forrest, a professional medium who works out of Dartmouth, says she has frequent conversations with God, and interacts with angels, fairies and dead people.

After writing three books cataloguing accounts of heavenly encounters in the Maritimes and across Canada, Forrest’s latest — Angel Lady of the Maritimes — is the story of her own life.

“I received so many questions from my clients and people who listened to me talk about my life, in how I went from a military background to a spiritual counsellor. So it was one way of addressing everyone’s questions about my background.”

Growing up in Halifax in a military family, Forrest was raised Roman Catholic and had a nun for a grandmother. From the time she was a teenager, Forrest said, she talked to God all the time, asking for advice and direction on her life path.

“When I hear God, it sounds like my own voice. So I don’t hear a deep booming voice coming down from heaven unless it’s an emergency and I’ll hear it like that, but my normal, everyday interactions, it’s like I’m talking to myself.”

She said she can tell it’s God because there is a sense of guidance, love and support interwoven in the conversation.

Her first life-changing event was a car accident in 1992 in New Brunswick; she survived a run-in with an 18-wheeler. Another came in 2002, when she felt Archangel Michael’s hands take the wheel to avoid a head-on collision, she said.

Forrest spent 17 years in the military, with deployments to Bosnia and Israel. She started out in communications but, after an encouraging conversation with God, she switched to mental health nursing, she said.

It was while she was counselling a group of soldiers who had returned from Afghanistan that she had her first “I see dead people” experience.

“During one of the sessions, one of the soldiers who had been killed started talking to me, and I was quite alarmed at first because I thought, ‘Why is this guy talking to me? Why do I hear him and what am I supposed to do with this?’”

She said she could hear the soldier’s voice and feel his presence, but she didn’t tell his friend because she didn’t feel it was her role as a mental health nurse. So she ignored the deceased visitor.

“But he kept saying, ‘I know you can hear me,’ and he said, ‘Tell these guys I’m OK’ and ‘You’ve got to pass on this message.’ And I’m sitting there trying not to react as though I’m hearing something.”

She said she saw her first ghost in 2004 during a trip to Gettysburg, Pa., where she glimpsed a wounded Confederate soldier on the battlefield.

That same year, Forrest started training in angel therapy, spiritual teaching and a medium mentoring program. She retired from the military in 2006.

Forrest gives readings, and is scheduled to give several speeches throughout the Maritimes this fall.

Angel Lady of the Maritimes is published by Pottersfield Press. Forrest’s first three books — Angels of the Maritimes (2008), Canadian Angels (2009) and Angels of the Maritimes Volume Two (2012) — tell of other people’s alleged encounters with angels.